set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body unruffled. Yet, I have
seen the whole world. I have learned all languages, lived after every
manner. I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father's corpse as a
pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the security of his bare word,
signed contracts in every capital of Europe, and left my gold without
hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained everything, because I
have known how to despise all things.

"My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive
possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to
unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides
with you but an idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a
man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of
happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea,
unspoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a key to all treasures; the
miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above
this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys. I have
reveled in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains!
I have seen all things, calmly, and without weariness; I have set my
desires on nothing; I have waited in expectation of everything. I have
walked to and fro in the world as in a garden round about my own
dwelling. Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call
them, are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I
express and transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting
them to prey upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert
myself with them as if they were romances which I could read by the
power of vision within me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution,
I still enjoy robust health; and as my mind is endowed with all the
force that I have not wasted, this head of mine is even better